Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nevers”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Current Ethnic Conflicts In Africa it often is difficult to distinguish ethnic con- flict of the kind being discussed here from local or temporary strife resulting from political processes. The worldwide democratization movement is also affecting African countries, and frequently this has ethnic overtones because one-party rule tends to mean one-culture dominance and because military rule often (although not always) means the same. When multi- party politics reached Togo, there were deathly riots that might have led to ongoing ethnic strife, but that did not follow. In Ghana, the continued rule of strong- man Jerry Rawlings is greased by comparatively strong economic growth, but ethnic issues are forcibly submerged. In Chad, seemingly always on the verge of civil war, successive coup attempts and French mil- itary involvement punctuatethe apparently hopeless struggle toward representative government. Indeed, in 1994, full-scale ethnic conflict was in progress in sev- eral locations. Liberia ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West Afri- can States (ECOWAS) peacekeeping force, has sup- pressed but not eliminated the carnage. What began as the ouster of the Americo-Liberian regime in Mon- rovia (and thus as a reformist conflict) evolved into an ethnic struggle involving supporters of the strongman, President Samuel Doe, and two rebels, Taylor and Johnson. Now a tribal conflict, the struggle has no end in sight, and the survival of Liberia as an entity is in doubt Sudan The latest phase of four decades of regional conflict in the Sudan is more than l0 years old. It is classic reli- gious-ethnic struggle on the northem perimeter of black Africa, but it is not simply a contest between north and south. Sudan has a complex ethnolinguistic mosaic. The northern provinces contain about 60 per- cent of the total population, and, while the north is overwhelmingly Muslim, only about two-thirds of the northemers speak Arabic as their native language. The Muslim but non-Arab northemers—including the Fur and Zaghawa in Darfur, the Nuba in South Kordofan, the Nubians of the far northjand others-—have been propaganda targets of the (south based) Sudan Peo- ple‘s Liberation Movement (SPLM). In the years lead- ing up to and following the coup that ousted Nimieri, conflict among non-Arab Northern ethnic groups, notably the Nuba and the Beni Amer in Red Sea Prov- ince, continued even as the larger war intensified. The SPLM’s military wing, the Sudan People’s Liber- ation Army, began its war against “the North” in 1983, in opposition to the Nimeiri government, which in that year announced the imposition of the sharia law over all of Sudan. The North-South war has swept back and forth across the countryside, devastating infrastructure and livelihoods and seemingly incapable of resolution. In the southern provinces, too, joint opposition to Khartoum’s rule was not enough to submerge ethnic conflicts. The schism between the Dinka-dominated faction, led by John Garang, and the mainly Nuer fac- tion, a breakaway group led by Riek Mashar, has pro- duced a three-way struggle. (The Dinka are from the west bank of the Nile, the Nuer, from the east, on the Ethiopian border). In mid-1992, a further power strug- gle produced still another split in the southern ranks. In June 1992, the warring parties met but without a settlement. In 1994, the North appeared poised to overcome the divided Southern forces, and promises of freedom of belief and religious observance, made by the govemment in 1992 in Abuja during negotia- tions under Nigerian auspices, were no longer heard. The regime that took power in 1989 is intransigent and virulently anti-Christian and anti-Westem; in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, when the United States declared Sudan a “terrorist state,” it expressed fears it shared with the southerners about to come under Khartoum’s sharia heel. The human cost of the Sudan conflict is staggering: in 1994 there were an estimated 7 million malnourished and 3 million starvation-threatened refugees in Sudan. Both the Khartoum regime and the southern factions have impeded the flow of relief to these refugees on the grounds that such aid has “strategic” value. 77 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.